Efficient Mining
This section shows the ores to mine for optimal gold income at each damage level. Profit Formula In order to figure out which ore is the most profitable to mine you need to know how many hits it will take to mine a certain ore and how much money it will give you. Dividing the latter by the former gives you the amount of profit per hit, which is what you will want to maximize. This can be expressed as p = m / h where p is the profit, m is the amount of money the ore gives when broken and h is the amount of hits required to break the ore. While m can be easily read from the ore, h takes some work to calculate. For starters, you need to figure out what your raw damage output is before any defense. This can be calculated by multiplying the base damage of your pick, your idle power, your active power and the damage bonus percentage for whichever click type you want to optimize your profits for (manual or auto clicks) divided by 100. In function form, r = p * i * a * b / 100 where r is your raw damage, p is your base pick damage, i is your idle power, a is your active power and b is the bonus percentage of whichever of the two click types you want to use. Next, this damge gets reduced by the defense of the ore, which gives your actual damage per click. Dividing the max health of the ore by this damage gives you the amount of clicks it takes to break the ore from full health. Of course, this value is rarely exactly a whole number of clicks, so since you can't click 0.2 times or something like that, you need to round this up to get the total amount of hits it takes to break the ore. In function form, h = ceiling/ (r - d) where hp is the max health of the ore (not h multiplied by p!) and d is the defense of the ore. Combined, this makes the formula p = m / (ceiling/ ([p * i * a * b / 100 - d)]). The way to find the optimal ore using this is to calculate this for ores of increasingly high level until p starts going down - the ore right before it goes down is the best ore you can mine at that point. Note that since Hellstone increases its health, defense and money gain at a set rate, you can incorporate those formulas into this one, replacing hp, d and m by them, to make it more complete. Note that this more precise calculation was added after the table below was made. As such, the table may no longer be accurate. Damage Breakpoints A damage breakpoint for an ore is the damage level at which it becomes the most efficient ore to mine. Raw Damage refers to damage before defense reductions (so the damage you would have against the Poo ore type). Shown Damage refers to damage after defense reductions (so the damage you see when mining an ore). Some ores have 'Never' marked down under their breakpoints, this is because they will never be the most efficient ore to mine (a higher level or lower level ore will be more efficient than it all all damage levels). List of Breakpoints Each level of Hellstone after Lv. 2 increases the breakpoint by a factor of 1.5